“It might not even be—”

“I don’t care.”

“They could fake—“

“No VRILs.”

“They could still—”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Nine hundred kilometers translated to a nearly twelve-hour drive at normal speeds. On their way down to Shevchenko, they’d taken it slowly, with plenty of breaks, which meant a day and a half on the road. Fatima went at least thirty over the speed limit on their way back, cutting the time to barely over eight hours. Nobody pulled them over; it was the dead of night, and most of the scant traffic was going the other direction. They got coffee at every gas stop.

Eight hours was still plenty of time for Fatima to try, and fail, many times, to talk Nadia out of it. They ran through every possible argument in sequence, so that by the end she could tell which one she was breaking out within five words, and their bickering degenerated into bizarre exchanges of half-sentences, only alluding to things they had said too many times already. Twice she forced Fatima to pull over so she could actually walk, in the cold and the dark; both times Fatima trailed her at a crawl, waiting for her to give in, and picked her back up within a minute when she didn’t look back. The third time Fatima turned around to drive them back, and refused to slow down to let her out, so she opened her door at highway speed and threatened to jump out.

That led to ten straight minutes of screaming and mutual accusations of selfishness, followed by half an hour of cold silence. But they were headed back towards Atyrau, so Nadia didn’t care. Ruslan slept through the whole thing in the back, no matter how loud they got or where they were going. Nadia almost envied him.

Their trip ended in the cold hours before sunrise on Sunday, the seventh of April. Nadia remembered afterwards the moment she looked at her watch, and it told her it was 7:09 in the morning. She knew she’d fallen asleep at some point in the past couple of hours, in spite of her resolve to stay up and keep Fatima from dawdling or turning them around again. She had no memory of sleeping or waking up, but too much time was unaccounted for, and the sky was too light.

She stared around for several seconds, trying to take in where they were, but everything was dark, flat, and empty. After a moment she caught a glimpse of a road sign, and concluded, after putting way too much thought into it, that they were going the right way.

“Thank you,” she said softly, and laid a hand on her sister’s shoulder.

“Sure,” Fatima mumbled back. Her hands were clenched on the wheel in front of her, her eyelids drooping. “Might want to pull over soon.”

“Atyrau can’t be far now, can it?” Fatima didn’t answer. The car wobbled, very slightly, on the road. “Give it a few more minutes. I don’t know if it’s safe to just pull over and sleep here.” She was just lucid enough to realize they would certainly attract some attention if they tried to sleep on the side of a major highway close to a city. She just had to keep Fatima awake. “It looks like Ruslan is waking up,” she said, just to say something.

“Good. Let him drive.”

The road kept going on, with nothing interesting out the window, just more flat bare ground. She was just thinking about what they were going to do, and wondering if they could both stay awake long enough, when they saw the military vehicles blocking the way. Two trucks, one personnel carrier, and a pair of soldiers holding up their hands for them to stop.

Nadia took a moment to register what that meant, and to come up with a response. Obviously she would have to do the talking. She cleared her throat to say as much, and in the exact same moment Fatima growled something profane under her breath, and slammed her fist on the dashboard. Mister Higgins popped into place beside the car, and pictures of an argument at a mechanic’s shop streaked through her head. By the time they were done, so was the obstruction, without so much as a scrap of a uniform left behind. The familiar disappeared last of all, before Nadia got a chance to process it, and Fatima gunned the engine to race down the freshly cleared road while her sister shook her head clear.

“Don’t even start with me,” Fatima snapped, before Nadia said anything. “This is what you wanted. It’s just what you’ve been asking for, the whole damn night. Now you got it. Deal.”

“I did not!” How many men had she just killed?

“Oh yeah? What did you think was going to happen? Two thousand men, they told us the news. Did you think they’d just let us move in and poke around, as long as we didn’t touch anything?”

But now she had something new to worry about. “Fatima, please. You’re going way too fast. Slow down!” They were in the suburbs now, with house after house rushing by, and the road wasn’t so straight.

“Yeah, I’m going fast. You know why? Because we just made a halo. We need to get the hell away from the scene, right now. Didn’t think of that either, did you?”

“We made a halo? You made a halo! Because you’re not thinking straight. Stop. Just stop. We need to pull over, and hide the car, and—“

“Whose fault is it that I’m not thinking straight, huh? Who said we had to haul ass all the way back here, now now now, and not wait till morning?”

“If you’re going to be so hateful, why did you even agree to this?”

“So now you’re acting like I had a choice?”

Vanya Morozov danced against the grey sky, shaking with the impacts. Two steps back on crooked legs, knees still bent to spring out of the trench. Nadia heard the shots just as he fell over, and landed tumbling in the wet muck. All the other boys were headed up and over already, and the guns were cracking, and Nadia was over too, but not conscious of deciding to do it. The order has been given. They will charge. The mud squished under her feet, and the rain came down, and muzzle flashes lit up like fireflies flirting in the distant woods.

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Karpov was the next to fall, with a noise like a pig’s squeal, but they were already moving too fast to stop and look. In the corner of her eye he fell, and became a blur in the mud. How far to the woods? How many men were waiting there? No idea. They were still running. Behind them, the artillery opened up, too late, and too few. Ahead, trees fell, and the earth erupted in clouds where the shells hit. The air in her lungs was cold, and she was conscious of every breath.

Another man fell, and another, but still she ran. There was a sense not of decrease but of concentration, as if every one of them who died fed his strength back into the whole. The momentum of the charge was preserved. She was young, and her legs were strong, and she was very much alive. If a bullet found her, that would change, but it had not found her yet. The flashes were brighter now, and all the rest of the world was a blur.

She tripped, or perhaps decided to dive at just that moment, prompted by the special angel appointed to watch over lunatics. The dive became a roll, and she rolled back up to her knees, and her gun swung up and opened fire into those dark woods, bang-bang-bang. All around her, the others followed suit. The light was blinding, and the noise struck her deaf, and she knew that whatever happened she had joined the ranks of the immortals, because she had joined the charge, because she was in that trench on that day, at that hour.

She blinked, and the car was finally stopped. All around them, titanic pillars of weathered stone reared up against the sky, dwarfing the drab little houses of Atyrau and cloaking them in shadow. Men and women hurried out of their doors to see, and fell on their knees in awe. Nadia wanted to join them, but couldn’t. All of a sudden, her body was strangely heavy. Even lifting her arm to reach the door handle took intense effort, and she soon gave up. Incredible things were happening. She didn’t want to miss them.

Fatima was less impressed, and whacked the dashboard with a burst of angry Pashto. “Come on, move, dammit!” She stomped on the accelerator as she said it, and the engine bellowed in response, but the car remained where it was. “Shit!” She turned to look at Nadia, who would have liked to carve her sister’s face into marble at that moment, and named it ‘courage.’ “Any ideas?” she said.

“This is marvelous, isn’t it?” Nadia said.

“That’s a no, then,” Fatima muttered, and kicked her door open with a grunt, and got out. “Come on, let’s go. Can’t stay here.”

“I can’t go,” Nadia told her.

“The hell you can’t!” She reached in and grabbed Nadia’s arm, and found she couldn’t lift it either. “Of all the—“ She turned to the back, where Nadia assumed she was trying the same thing with Ruslan, only she couldn’t turn her head to see. Even breathing was kind of hard now. “Oh, fuck this!”

“How are you moving?” Nadia wondered, and got no answer. “Oh, what’s that?” It was a shame she couldn’t lift her arm to point. A great golden creature, something a little bit like an armored mantis with a spear, was prancing down the street in their direction.

Fatima turned to look—whacking her head on the car’s roof in the process—and let out a scream of rage. Nadia couldn’t quite see what she did after that, but it involved a lot of spluttery noises coming out of her mouth. At last Nadia heard a serious of very loud noises, and without turning to look she could see in her mind her sister standing her ground, legs planted far apart, and opening fire against impossible odds. It was enough to make her weep, and she did. But she blinked the tears away, so as not to miss what would happen next.

The golden beast wasn’t hurt by her shots; it wasn’t even clear whether any of them hit him. He looked right at them with his shining red eyes, and broke into a full gallop. Fatima said something in Spanish, and Nadia could hear her footsteps break into a run on the pavement. Probably to go get reinforcements, for a triumphant return. But the great beast was faster, and shot past their car in seconds. More curses, another gunshot, then a shout, and the golden figure came trotting back, with Fatima dangling upside-down from his left hand by her ankle. It was magnificent how she kept fighting, even if she accomplished nothing by swatting at the air like that.

The giant gestured with his other hand—the one holding a spear—and the car went back into motion, first rising up off the ground with a jerk, then sliding forward as smoothly as a skater crossing fresh ice. Inside it, Nadia felt her weight decrease, and she sat up in her seat to get a better view. She felt that she ought to be doing something, but couldn’t think what. She turned to look at Ruslan, who caught her eye and smiled. He looked confident. She knew how he felt. This was their day of battle.

They were moving very quickly now, shooting down the street with terrific acceleration. The golden god had to gallop again to keep pace beside them, Fatima tucked under one arm, pounding at his back ineffectually with her fists. Every hit made a loud clang, which the giant didn’t seem to notice.

She was just starting to wonder where he was taking them when the car slid to a halt. Nadia looked around, but they were in the middle of an intersection, with burned-out buildings at all four corners. Nothing there. Their captor took a few steps forward, hefting his spear. It was hard to read such a strange body’s posture, but he looked tense. In the distance, something rumbled, a noise like a growling bear.

Then, in the blink of an eye, he was gone, and Fatima fell. In the same instant the car came crashing down, and something in its undercarriage crunched with the impact. Nadia barely threw out her arms in time to keep her head from slamming into the dash. For several seconds she lay there, breathing hard and shaking off the last traces of the valence. She had come very close to disaster, and escaped by luck; she felt herself panting with sudden fear. And yet she was tired as well, very tired. It was tempting to close her eyes, and simply fall asleep where she was.

“Hey! A little help, here?” Nadia sighed, and clambered over to look out the driver’s side window. Fatima was sitting on the asphalt, one arm clutched closed to her chest, the other reaching down to grasp her ankle. “What do you think you’re doing? Help me up.”

Coming off a valence was much worse when you were tired; it took a couple of tries to work the door handle, and then she almost smacked Fatima in the head opening it. “What’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong? I fell like eight feet, is what’s wrong. Onto hard-ass pavement. What do you think happened?”

“Oh, god. Did you break something?” She leaned over to help her up, and got her hands slapped away.

“Ouch! Not there, dammit! I broke a bunch of somethings. Something in this arm, a couple somethings in my leg, damn near something in my hip. I’m lucky there’s something left of my head. And whose fault is all that?”

“Fatima, do you have to? Just show me where it’s safe to grab you, and we’ll get you out of here.” Assuming the car still worked, which it probably didn’t. One problem at a time.

The car creaked ominously as she hoisted her sister back into the driver’s seat—a process that involved a lot of hissing and groaning. Only when they were finished did she realize that Fatima had hurt her right leg. Which meant it was up to Nadia to get her out, secure her in the passenger’s seat, then try to teach herself to drive out of there (on the off-chance the car still worked), all before the gold monster or something worse came back to finish them off. The temptation to simply give up and cry was almost overwhelming.

“Hey. Incoming.”

She looked up. A white pickup truck was headed their way, the same direction that the gold thing had come from. Moving fast, too. And here she was, standing in plain view outside the driver’s door like a fool. “Fatima, get Mister Higgins.”

Too late. A fresh valence came pouring over them like a flood, bringing with it a soothing picture of a tree in flower, and a tidy little house, and an old lady, dark-skinned and white-haired, reading in a chair. The truck screeched to a halt beside them just as it finished; Nadia saw a hunchbacked figure standing in the bed looking back, wrapped in a brilliant white cloth.

Then the truck’s door opened, and she found herself swept up, a little too tightly, into the arms of a woman in Kazakh dress. It should have alarmed her, but it didn’t feel that way. It was just what she needed now, a pair of arms to hold her, and a voice to murmur in her ear what she already knew, that everything was going to be okay. It took her a moment to realize that the murmured words were English, and with a strange accent at that. Then she reflected that the cheek beside hers was awfully dark, for a Kazakh’s, and the hair under her scarf too coarse, and that the figure in the back of the truck was familiar.

But Fatima put it all together first. “About damn time you showed up. What’s the plan, Ballsy Bob?”

The hunchback in the truck bed cringed, and Keisha with her, as a black dragon rose into the morning sky over the center of the city.